Senator's daughter finds fault in D.C.

As the daughter of Sen. Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota), Jessamyn Conrad has been around the nation’s political process plenty. Her verdict? It stinks.

“We have a situation where there’s little ability in Washington to be reasonable and to — I don’t want to say be nonpartisan — but to negotiate,” Jessamyn Conrad told POLITICO. “It’s scary that we don’t have the political will to deal with these problems.”

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For her part, the 34-year-old Conrad is out with a new edition of her book “What You Should Know About Politics … But Don’t: A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues That Matter,” a tome that she thinks should be required reading as we close in on Election Day (she wrote the first edition in the lead-up to the 2008 election).

Conrad, who lives in New York City, says that growing up in a political household, “I’ve definitely seen the danger of polarization first hand.”

“I see how my father has gone through attempting to create a budget amendment and deficit reduction and stuff that’s just so important and there’s a lot of common sense to it and everybody is nuts around this stuff — both left and right,” she said. “It’s not just one group that has a patent on crazy. It’s extremely frustrating when you get down to things that have extraordinary important outcomes, like the debt ceiling, like the fiscal cliff, like how are we going to regulate the financial system so that something like 2008 doesn’t happen again?”

The media is to blame, as well.

“I know that most of these main outlets are either consciously obfuscating information and lying about it or they’re just really dumb and not presenting the issue in a complicated or complex way,” Jessamyn Conrad says. Cable news, she adds, “is more like sports TV, it’s just about people being aggressive and screaming at each other.”

Just as hard as getting a serious debate going in Congress is getting a serious book deal, Conrad says. She recounts this story about her book’s journey.

“When I first wrote the book proposal, an editor — a very senior editor at one of the major publishing houses — wanted to buy it and his marketing department nixed it, vetoed it, because they said, ‘We only sell partisan books. The more partisan, the better.’”

Her book has this going for it, however: It has some serious nonpartisan bonafides: Barack Obama, Trent Lott and Bob Dole all offered up blurbs praising it.

“Engaging and inspiring,” writes Obama. “Reading this book should make you want to vote.”

Readers' Comments (3)

“We have a situation where there’s little ability in Washington to be reasonable and to — I don’t want to say be nonpartisan — but to negotiate,” Jessamyn Conrad told POLITICO. “It’s scary that we don’t have the political will to deal with these problems.”

Party primaries produce polar candidates. Moderates of either party who could/would work to find common ground for governance are not selected by the wingnuts. The result is a polar Congress that does nothing for America. Some states have begun to address this by allowing open primaries. "Work for the Middleground."

Usually when someone writes a book or speaks on a topic they have some real world experience to talk of. Being a Senators daughter, does not really qualify you does it? Maybe if she ran for office, worked in a state or federal legislature, taught political science at a university, maybe even served in a city council seat it would give it two minutes. She's a Senators daughter, she's presentable, somewhat funny, other than that why are we listening to her? All of the democracy demonstrators in countries deserve more ink. I don't hate her, but unsure of her value to the conversation.